Lawson, A. (2021) - The Entangled Activist.pdf

Introduction

Activist/ Campaigner as role or identity - "People were never neutral."

It wasn’t only the fact of what I was doing that provoked reactions, however. It was also the way I spoke about my work, the intensity of my evident passion. I would get so wound up with righteous fury, speaking so fast and sharply about the people who defended or profited from the bad things I wanted to change, that colleagues, friends and family would regularly be prompted to ask, ‘are you ok?’ And these were people who knew me, who cared enough to ask. My suspicion is that many of the people I was trying to persuade directly were switching off rather than have to deal with the frenetic force of my arguments.
p.11

The idea that the issues outlined in the book are "part of the territory" as existing both inside and outside - and puts people off:

And that is just how activists are, say observers from outside. They’re hypocritical, hysterical, they’re often fighting each other, they think they are doing it for love and care but give them any power and they’ll be trying to control us all. The fear that activism can lead to the gulag or the guillotine is real: history is full of revolutionaries who became tyrants.
p.12

core question: "Why are activists unconsciously replicating so many aspects of the systems we don't want?" p.2

So while I started off thinking that my question was about tracking down and illuminating the inner life of activism that was missing in all of our non-stop action, my conversations with other campaigners, my reading and reflecting on my own experiences led me, inexorably, to seeing how entangled we are. How the damage that is caused by the systems we are trying to change runs through us too.
p.13

Entanglements:

Implicit view that the ‘world’ is separate to ‘us’, and that what needs changing is something or someone ‘over there’: something that is ‘not us’
p.13

drops a few frameworks that will be used throughout the book - #complex-adaptive-systems-theory, #deep-ecology, #spirituality, #depth-psychology to reflect on the "narrowing" that takes place:

It is of course very useful, however, this narrowed perception that structures ‘normal’ reality, in keeping us chained to business as usual.
So this book is called The Entangled Activist because it is about how activists are always entangled in the problems we are trying to fix or change, whether we realise it or not. It is about how we are entangled, what and who we’re entangled with, why it matters and what we can do when we realise it.
p.14

obvious entanglements - western, imperial core, extraction colonialism etc. and less obvious - burnout, saviourism, attack, righteousness, dishonesty.

What are we entangled in? We are entangled in the ==stories ==that our culture tells about heroes and saviours, and hard work, and the value of doing over being. We are entangled in the oppressive effects of systems of power upon us, whether we have suffered from them or benefited from them or both, and whether or not we can perceive that there are other more generative forms of power that are based in partnership rather than dominance. We are entangled in the habits and ways of being that are normalised in a culture where truly feeling – our own pain, and that of human and non- human others – is numbed and discouraged.
p.15

Entanglements impact methods - projection, externalisation, same mindsets causing the problems being acted against.

links to Lessing, D () - The Good Terrorist - the entanglements are right there in TGT, Alice's are central to the book.

If the problems go that deep, if they run through all of us, then what hope is there of changing them? It can sound like we are being asked to change human nature. I choose to see it the other way. If we are so entangled that the problems run through us too, then we know where to start: with ourselves. p.16

We can do both reflection and action, as long as we acknowledge that the reflection may profoundly alter what we think the task of the action is. Appreciating the depth of our own entanglement is a useful guide to what needs doing. p.16

Activism is the constant task of trying to mitigate against the worst of what we humans are capable of, while orienting our societies towards the flourishing of the best. pp. 16-17

Activism as varied - expansive, anything which tries to make the world a better place - it echoes the "activism as practice" in the conclusion. Importance of "staying with the trouble" - of doing at the same time as reflecting, the doing as giving opportunities for the reflecting. Example of the election meeting:

enormous difficulty of holding and articulating passionate views while still communicating persuasively with those who do not share them. p.17

Difficulty - Discomfort

I have done the same, so many times: failed to see that the starting place does not have to be me and my views; failed to see that starting with me and my pressing desire to speak may not be the best route to the fairer world I want to help create. I am still not yet always able to stop myself doing it. I am quick to anger, quick to find words ready formed in my mouth, words which want to come out. But now I observe it happening in others and I see its limitations P.18

and reflections in daily life - parenting for Lawson.

valuable daily opportunities to reflect on where the stridency in activism can come from and to consider the risk of unleashing the inner authoritarian in all of us. p.18

knowing and doing - reflection as the bridge between the two
Discomfort as Offering-Practice

Caveats - speaking from own experience, trying to include the experiences of others and diverse perspectives but interpretation is limited by own individual lens, broad strokes:

I am willing to take this risk, for which I apologise in advance, because I think there are some things that are worth saying about activism as a phenomenon. p.19

Chapter 7

Activists of all kinds are telling stories all the time: about what is wrong with the world, about what will make it better, about how to get there. Someone’s reactivity to activists who are telling ‘stories’ – or ideology – about reality is grounded in a fear that those stories and ideologies will become weaponised against certain people, certain beneficiaries of the status quo … perhaps against themselves. Such opposition to ideologies can even become ideological in itself; and I am saying ‘ideological’, there, in the pejorative sense of ‘something that is done without thinking’. Somebody ‘just knows’, for example, that they distrust conservatives. Or, that they distrust activists. Or that they distrust anyone who talks about ‘white men’ or ‘privilege’. They observe what looks like lack of thinking in activist ideology. They do not always observe the possibility of their own defensiveness about the problems that the activists are trying to talk about, a defensiveness that may be rooted in the stories that they like to tell about the world, or about themselves as good people. The thing is, activists are often ideological. We are often working according to a set of ideas about human needs and how to meet them with particular political and economic actions. We are acting towards the adoption of one set of ideologies, while trying to unwrap the tentacles of the old ones from around our ankles – and perhaps failing to see quite how many tentacles there are. And we are, too, often busy promoting our chosen ideology without being aware of what we have invested in it
p.?